What Really Matters for America? Ask Tim Goeglein |
We live in a society where social media, 24/7 television news, talk radio, and online websites compete for clicks and audiences with increasingly hysterical headlines designed to focus our attention on the next crisis—real or imagined—in their news cycle. Eric Swalwell, the Donald Trump “Jesus meme,” gas prices, the upcoming midterms, Erika Kirk death threats, and on and on and on. One day, Nancy Guthrie disappears, and that dominates cable news coverage for weeks; she’s never been found, but that’s now old news. Crazy.
Sometimes it is good to pull back from the screaming newscasters and consider that Earth continues to spin on its axis, regardless of whether we fixate on the Calamity du Jour. For example, back in 1961, our dear family friend Dr. Donald J. Grout—chairman of the Music Department at Cornell University—retreated to a remote, quiet area of Germany’s Black Forest to edit and revise his foundational work, "A Short History of Opera," first published in 1947. While secluded in the Black Forest, elsewhere in Germany, communist leaders erected the Berlin Wall, dividing East and West Germany for decades and causing an international incident that almost triggered World War III.
When Dr. Grout finally emerged from his cottage in the forest and drove to the German border, he was detained but eventually allowed to return to the United States… having been blissfully........